LUXEMBOURG — The European Commission didn’t want to reveal which staffers worked on Covid vaccine contract negotiations with pharma companies to avoid them being targeted by “conspiracy theorists,” its lawyers said Wednesday. A “lack of trust” about the contracts meant officials could have been subjected to “physical or psychological” harassment, said Antonios Bouchagiar, a Commission lawyer. “It’s a real risk in this case,” he added in a courtroom in Luxembourg.  The Commission is fighting a 2024 ruling from the EU’s General Court (the bloc’s lower court) that said it should have provided more details about the lucrative contracts — and the people negotiating them — when asked to do so by a group of Green MEPs and members of the public. The court ruled there was sufficient public interest in disclosing that information, saying: “It was only by having the names, surnames and details of the professional or institutional role of the members of the team in question that they could have ascertained whether or not the members of that team had a conflict of interests.” The Commission disagreed with that ruling and the case is now at the bloc’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the EU. The Commission signed six advance purchase agreements with pharma companies at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, promising to buy a certain amount of vaccines for European citizens as part of the EU’s bloc-wide approach to tackling the virus. The Green lawmakers said the public deserved to know more about how those contracts — worth millions of euros — came to be negotiated. When the MEPs made requests for access to documents, the Commission published redacted information. More than 3,000 members of the public, many of them skeptics of the EU’s approach and some hostile to mass vaccination policies, brought a separate legal action against the Commission. Lawyers for both the MEPs and the EU citizens were in court on Wednesday, arguing in front of a packed public gallery that the Commission should uphold the highest standards of transparency. “It is not some abstract aspiration,” said Raluca Gherghinaru, the lawyer for the MEPs, but a “constitutional value.” She added: “In crisis, we might expect leaders to be more accountable.” The Commission’s lawyers said the EU executive has already demonstrated a high level of accountability. Unredacted documents which prove that the negotiating team had no conflict of interest were studied by the European Court of Auditors, the lawyers said, adding that the anti-fraud agency (OLAF) and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) could look into the contracts if they felt that was necessary. Arnaud Durand, the lawyer for the members of the public who brought the case, argued that EPPO isn’t sufficiently independent because its budget is signed off by the Commission.  The Commission’s lawyers disputed that, saying independence is baked into EPPO and OLAF’s rules. The Commission also faced tough questioning from the president of the court, Koen Lenaerts, who asked: “Do you really mean that?” when Commission lawyers said that a request for access to information from a member of the public with a “lack of specific interest” should not automatically have to be complied with. Officials have “the right to work in serenity without having the finger pointed for some policy that they didn’t decide,” Bouchagiar said. But Lenaerts argued that the negotiations do not only take place at the highest political level but also at a technical level, and therefore any potential conflicts of interest of the civil servants involved deserve to be scrutinized. To laughter in the court, Lenaerts repeated the Commission’s argument that disclosing the names of staffers could lead to harassment, “particularly by conspiracy theorists.” Would disclosing those names “not be the best way of combating these conspiracy theorists?” he asked. The next step in the case will be a legal opinion on June 11 by Advocate-General Athanasios Rantos, which will guide the judges on their final ruling. No date has yet been given for that ruling. The EU’s Covid vaccine agreements have become a flashpoint for transparency campaigners, with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen coming under fire for her text messages with the CEO of Pfizer, which secured a multibillion-euro agreement with the Commission.  The Commission’s refusal to release von der Leyen’s messages came to be known as “Pfizergate.” The General Court ruled that the Commission was ultimately wrong not to reveal the messages.

BRUSSELS — The president of the European Commission auto-deletes messages from her phone in part to save storage space, the EU executive said this week. Tech experts have but one question: Really? Deleting messages to save space “sounds cute but also hard to believe. Let’s not be silly here, it’s not the 1990s,” said Lukasz Olejnik, senior research fellow at King’s College London and a cybersecurity expert. “A text message barely takes any room on a modern phone. Like, you would need to get hundreds of thousands of text messages for it to actually make a difference,” Belgian ethical hacker Inti De Ceukelaire said, calling the Commission’s explanation “a non-argument.” “Why doesn’t she change to a phone with more storage?” asked Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for data and analytics at technology market research firm IDC in Europe. Ursula von der Leyen is in the hot seat over a text message she received from French President Emmanuel Macron last year urging her to block the EU-Mercosur trade deal, as first reported by POLITICO. The message was subsequently deleted from von der Leyen’s phone, the Commission said in response to an access to documents request filed by Follow the Money reporter Alexander Fanta. The Commission told its staff in 2020 to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications. | Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images On Wednesday Commission spokesperson Olof Gill told reporters: “The messages are auto-deleted after a while, just for space reasons.” He jokingly added: “Otherwise, the phone would go on fire.” Another spokesperson, Balazs Ujvari, added it also helped prevent security breaches, but doubled down on the idea that it was a means of saving space: “On the one hand, it reduces the risk of leaks and security breaches, which is of course an important factor … And also, it’s a question of space on the phone, so, effective use of a mobile device.” To be sure, many Europeans have struggled with overloaded phone storage. But for most it’s a matter of home videos and reams of family pictures that are clogging devices. “Messages take up a lot of space if we are talking about videos, voice recordings,” IDC’s Jeronimo said, whereas text-based messages “take nearly nothing from the storage.” The Commission told its staff in 2020 to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications. The institution recommended using the app’s disappearing messages functionality in a 2022 guidance called “Checklist to Make Your Signal Safer.” For security purposes it makes sense, Jeronimo said. “If someone like [von der Leyen] loses her phone, or if the phone is hacked … there’s a very high risk” that her communications will be compromised. But the Macron text again trains the spotlight on the EU executive’s policies regarding keeping a public record of its leader’s communications, following a scandal dubbed “Pfizergate” in which von der Leyen’s text exchanges with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla over Covid vaccine contracts were never archived. The European Ombudsman continues to investigate Pfizergate, and this week announced it had opened an investigation into last year’s text from Macron. According to Olejnik, “the truth is that [auto-deleting messages] is great for security, not so [much] for public transparency or accountability.” Gerardo Fortuna contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission reviewed texts sent between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer’s chief executive officer and sought by journalists at the height of the pandemic — and allowed them to be lost. A Commission document sent this week to The New York Times confirms that von der Leyen’s head of cabinet in summer 2021 found the messages sent between the pair ahead of a multibillion-euro vaccine deal agreed between Pfizer and the EU. The document says that since the messages — which journalists asked to see under a Freedom of Information request — were logistical and “short-lived” in nature, they weren’t considered to be worth registering formally. The mobile phone used by von der Leyen has been replaced several times since then with the data not having been transferred, the document continued. In May, the EU’s lower tier General Court ruled that the EU executive was wrong not to release the texts, a decision that Politico revealed this week the Commission will not be contesting at the top tier court. The case became a flashpoint for transparency activists who said it demonstrated the lack of accountability in von der Leyen’s Commission ― and for people who opposed the use of the vaccine in the first place. At the beginning of July, von der Leyen successfully saw off a no-confidence vote in the European Parliament over the case, triggered by right-wing Romanian MEP Gheorghe Piperea.

BRUSSELS ― The deadline has passed for the European Commission to appeal an EU court judgment over President Ursula von der Leyen’s text message exchange with a vaccine-maker at the height of the Covid pandemic. It means the EU’s General Court finding in May will stand. The court ruled that the Commission failed to explain why messages shared between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla didn’t contain important information that would have required retention. In a case that became known as “Pfizergate,” reporters asked to see the messages after it was revealed in a 2021 New York Times interview with von der Leyen that she had exchanged texts with Bourla ahead of a multibillion-euro vaccine deal agreed between Pfizer and the EU. The case became a flashpoint for transparency activists who said it demonstrated the lack of accountability in von der Leyen’s Commission ― and for people who opposed the use of the vaccine in the first place. NO-CONFIDENCE VOTE The deadline for the EU executive to contest the decision in the EU’s top-tier Court of Justice passed earlier this month without the Commission appealing, a spokesperson for the EU courts confirmed. At the beginning of July, von der Leyen faced a no-confidence vote in the European Parliament over the case, triggered by right-wing Romanian MEP Gheorghe Piperea. While the Commission president easily survived the vote after the majority of MEPs backed her leadership, the debate became the first time she has publicly defended herself over the case. She told lawmakers in Strasbourg that some accusations leveled against her were “simply a lie.” Whether the Commission’s non-appeal means that the messages will be released is another matter. The court ruling conceded that retrieving the texts will be difficult, and a spokesperson for the Commission said that in line with the ruling it would provide “a more detailed explanation as to why it does not hold the requested documents.” The court “did not put into question the Commission’s registration policy regarding access to documents,” the spokesperson said, adding that the EU executive “remains fully committed to maintaining openness, accountability, and clear communication with all stakeholders, including EU institutions, civil society, and interest representatives.”

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Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday survived a vote of confidence in her leadership, but the event wasn’t a complete victory for the European Commission president. If the European Parliament motion had passed, von der Leyen and her team of commissioners would have been forced to stand down — an unlikely scenario that would have plunged the EU into chaos. The motion of censure instead got the support of 175 lawmakers, well short of the two-thirds majority needed for it to pass. Support for von der Leyen — in the form of votes rejecting the censure motion — came, as expected, mostly from centrist political groups, including her own European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats, the liberal Renew, and the Greens. But on closer inspection, the support for von der Leyen was lackluster. Just 553 of the Parliament’s 719 MEPs showed up to vote. At least part of that absenteeism appears to have been deliberate, as 636 lawmakers cast a ballot in the next vote on the Parliament’s schedule, which took place just minutes later. Overall, twice as many lawmakers rejected the motion against von der Leyen as supported it. Still, with 166 missing votes, the show of support for von der Leyen was lukewarm. Barely 30 percent of Italy’s MEPs voted in support of von der Leyen; half skipped the vote. And just 32 percent of France’s EU lawmakers voted against the motion — with one-quarter of all French MEPs not showing up to vote. In four EU countries — Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and also France — the number of MEPs supporting the motion to force von der Leyen out was higher than the number of those who voted against it.